“Side Hustle Bread” Insta Account Sells $100,000

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Welcome to Recital School and happy Independence Day. Today is the 4th of July, episode 1646. Of course, you could be listening later. You could also be listening elsewhere as in outside the United States. But the thing about Independence Day is seems like a good day for everyone, right?

So not just an American holiday, or at least it needn't be. Think about your own independence. Think about your freedom. What are you doing to increase it? How can you have more options for yourself to do more of what's important to you?

That's what I've been trying to help you with since January 1, 2017 in this daily nonstop unstoppable, let's say that, unstoppable streak of stories. So for today, do you remember that time when you started a business as a joke, but it ended up making $100,000? Wait, you don't remember that? Well, the Serpico family does. They've been living this experience for the past year.

It's a very complex business. Let me make sure I have the notes right here. Basically think DeFi with silicon microchips combined with artificial intelligence, machine learning. Oh my gosh, I am looking at the wrong info. Their business is actually baking bread.

That's right, a six figure baking business that started as an online joke. No joke, actually. I mean, this is the case. It starts as a joke, but it's really not. Who is laughing now?

No one. In fact, they're just doing a lot of baking. Side hustle bread Insta account sells $100,000. That is today's story. Stay tuned.

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For TV and film producer Jim Serpico, baking bread had always been a hobby that he and his family took seriously. Growing up, he spent most of his weekends cooking with his parents, both of whom made it a point to involve him in their Sunday rituals of making rigatoni and bolognese. Jim loved it, but as an adult, he headed down his own path of baking the perfect bread. That bread became a staple at every social gathering and a Serpico family tradition of baking on the weekends soon began. When COVID-19 hit and lockdown restrictions were enforced, the family found that most of them were at home in Long Island, New York most of the time.

This was unusual and the weekdays began to seem like weekends, which provided them an opportunity to spend more time baking. As they continued to bake, the family joked that they should start selling the goods and created an Instagram account called Side Hustle Bread. That's just @sidehustlebread for laughs. What they didn't expect was that within a week, they would start receiving direct messages from strangers asking if they could order some of the bread. Out of curiosity, they fulfilled these orders, thinking that they were one-offs, but found that the orders didn't stop.

In fact, they grew more orders. Little did they know this would be the start of a thriving family business. Now, one of the first challenges that Jim encountered was the lack of space that they had. After about three weeks of launching this Instagram account, they were averaging 20 orders a week and an average of three loaves per order. This, if my math is correct, comes up to 60 loaves of bread, which was difficult to fulfill since their home oven could only fit four loaves at a time.

It didn't help that there was a large variety of bread that the family was making, all of which required different temperatures. This made Jim's days long and inefficient, thus began the search for a commercial oven. Eventually, they found a model that could accommodate six times what their old oven could, and Jim took the plunge by buying it, but it turned out even that wasn't sufficient to meet demand. As the orders grew in size and frequency, Jim rented out space at a local bagel shop and then a deli to bake in their off hours. This combination, commercial oven, bagel shop, deli, allowed the family to eventually pump out 700 loaves of bread every weekend.

Meanwhile, other parts of the business grew in complexity as well, but the Serpico family pressed on with a divide and conquer strategy. Jim would handle the menu for the week, as well as procuring all the supplies that were needed. His wife, Sherry, would take the orders and handle the accounts, as well as scheduling people to help out with the baking effort at the spaces they rented. The youngest son, Miles, would maintain their website, while the eldest, James, along with James' girlfriend, helped with social media marketing. All of them would help with the baking as well, allowing the operation to run flawlessly.

Looking back, Jim says that social media was definitely key to spreading the word about side-lessle bread, especially since they didn't plan to launch it as a business. The family would shoot videos of them making bread, sometimes freaking out over a failed sourdough bake, and add in soundtracks during the editing process to create music videos. Friends and family found this funny and helped spread the word when they shared them. It helped as well that the family baked artisanal bread and tried flavors that you couldn't find in normal bakeries. This naturally led many people to be curious, which also helped with the popularity of their Instagram stories and posts.

Within three months, they had built a loyal following of over 2,500 followers on Instagram. As a quick side note, we're gonna come back to that because hundreds of orders every week from a relatively small following is really interesting. So hold that thought. For Jim, the best part of this side-lessle has been working with his family. Since everyone was either studying or working full-time, time together pre-COVID was usually found only on the weekends.

But with side-lessle bread, the family now spends more time together, continuing a long tradition of bonding over cooking and baking. Oh, and the family has been rewarded financially as well with side-hustle bread grossing over $100,000 last year. Jim is now shopping a television pilot about his experience selling bread during lockdown. [Music]

Side-hustle bread, I love it. Also, I'm a little surprised that @sidehustlebread wasn't taken on Instagram, but apparently Jim and family got to it first.

So good work. Okay, let's go back to that 2,500 followers because 2,500 followers is not a huge number of followers. Pretty incredible that they've been able to have so much demand from a relatively small audience. That actually is much more impressive than somebody who has, I don't know, 25,000, 250,000, whatever the number is. There are lots of people who have higher follower numbers but wouldn't get anywhere near that level of engagement or conversion rate on selling anything, let alone selling a food item that you have to be in a pretty specific location to be able to purchase.

So the point there, to me, this shows the power of small focused engagement. There was a book a long time ago I really liked called "The Power of Full Engagement." This is like the power of small focused engagement. Very cool project. Congratulations, guys. Hopefully I'll get a chance to try that bread at some point.

And listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to Side Hustle Bread, just in case you can't find them on Instagram, plus everything else I mentioned will be at sidehustleschool.com/1646. Once again, happy Independence Day. I hope you're doing something today to get closer to a goal you believe in. I hope you'll subscribe, follow, come back for more.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.